An American rocket has a fine debut; not so the Moon lander on board

ON THE MORNING of January 8th America tried for the first time in more than 50 years to launch a spacecraft designed to touch down gently on the Moon. The previous attempt, in 1972, was one of the great space-age spectaculars. The Apollo 17 mission was the only time a Saturn V, until last year the most powerful rocket ever to reach orbit, took off at night; Challenger, the lander it put on the Moon, was home to two astronauts for more than three days of lunar exploration, the longest ever such sojourn.

Compared with this, Monday’s launch of a Vulcan Centaur rocket, carrying Peregrine One, a robot lander less than a tenth the weight of an Apollo lunar module, was a distinctly modest affair, and with the subsequent failure of Peregrine One’s propulsion system it was hardly an unmitigated success. But whereas the Apollo 17 launch marked the end of an era, this was about new beginnings: a new rocket, a new type of lander and a new way of doing lunar science. And whereas the 1972 mission was a monument to the extraordinary things which governments can achieve when everything goes right, this week’s events show the ever greater role that a competitive private sector is playing in space, in terms of both lower costs and greater redundancy.